Although advertisements on the web pages may degrade your experience, our business certainly depends on them and we can only keep providing you high-quality research based articles as long as we can display ads on our pages.

To view this article, you can disable your ad blocker and refresh this page or simply login.

Aug. 27 is one of the most important days in the history of the energy industry for two reasons: coal and oil. Let’s take a look at the historic events that took place regarding both of these critical fuels, which combine to provide 56% of all American energy. We’ll delve into another energy-industry milestone as well.

Fired up
On Aug. 27, 1838, the Mauch Chunk blast furnace in Pennsylvania became the first industrial furnace to smelt iron with anthracite coal. This took place three decades after the first documented use of the harder, hotter-burning coal as a source of fuel, and it was the culmination of more than a decade of effort to put anthracite to work in iron furnaces.

The Mauch Chunk furnace turned out more than 100 tons of anthracite-fired iron before halting production in 1839, but its success was soon replicated. A year after the Mauch Chunk furnace went cold, the Lehigh Crane Iron Company began to fire iron with anthracite in its own furnace. By the end of the 1840s, there were 55 anthracite-fired blast furnaces in Pennsylvania alone, and by 1860, nearly 60% of total American iron-production came from anthracite-fired blast furnaces. Anthracite coal mining volume in the United States peaked in 1917 at an incredible 100 million tons, which means that more than 6,340 pounds of anthracite coal were extracted from beneath American soils every second of the year.

Anthracite coal production in the U.S. has declined dramatically since 1917, and today barely 2 million tons are mined each year. However, total coal production has not been hampered — nearly 1.1 billion tons of coal was mined in the U.S. in 2010. The largest American producer that year, Peabody Energy Corporation (NYSE:BTU), dug up 146 million tons of that total.

The dawn of a new industry
The American oil industry was born on Aug. 27, 1859, when “Colonel” Edwin Drake struck oil 70 feet beneath the surface of Titusville, Penn. It was not the first time oil was extracted. In fact, naturally occurring “oil seeps” had been exploited for more than a thousand years, and accidental oil wells had been created for several decades prior to Drake’s discovery by drillers who sought out subterranean salt brine. But it was the first time that a modern, purpose-built oil rig dug into the earth and found black gold. Drake’s success set off an oil-drilling boom that has never stopped.

The Drake success story almost never happened. By chance, Drake happened to stay at the same hotel as the founders of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company (later renamed Seneca Oil), the first oil company in the U.S. His desperate need for work, as well as prior connections allowing him free rail travel, helped the inexperienced Drake wedge his foot in the door as the company’s first drill foreman. Drake was hired in 1858 on an annual salary of $1,000 (equal to about $29,000 today) and was sent to drill the area near Titusville where oil seeps had been found.

Drake spent much of the next few months building a derrick in the style of existing salt-brine wells. The ground beneath Drake’s derrick was loose with gravel and threatened to cave in the borehole before drilling had gone 20 feet down. Urja Dav of Pennsylvania State University explains the breakthrough that allowed Drake to keep drilling and eventually succeed:

In order to overcome the hurdles before him, he invented a “drive pipe” or “conductor,” an invention he unfortunately did not patent. Accordingly to The Daily Picayune, “Mr. Drake conceived the idea of driving a pipe down to the rock through which to start the drill.” Drake’s invention drilled an average of three feet per day through rock and shale. Although the “drive pipe” caused some problems, it paid off on August 27, 1859 when at a shallow 69.5 feet Drake struck black gold.